I remember when I first heard this question as a child I felt I immediately knew the answer, and that answer was something simple like playing Pogs, completing the collection in my Zelda sticker book, getting the latest “Back to the Future” micro machines or playing on my Sega. As I grew older, and hit my teens I defined it as kissing girls and learning how to talk to and understand them, and now that I’m married and in my 20′s I feel it is to explore the world and expand my knowledge and experience of everything while I still have the energy, the willpower and the means to do so. I’m sure as I progress into middle age and beyond, what meaning and purpose I put on existence will also change accordingly.

In personal nature, I’d say I’d define myself as a Utilitarian. If an action brings a person happiness, or brings happiness to the majority then it has intrinsic value. I think the capitalist society we live in, in the developed West at least, has clouded are, again clichéd, pursuit of happiness. All too often more effort in our lives goes into accumulating wealth rather than thinking about what we could be doing that would make us happy. People spend a huge chunk of their lives hating the work they do, or the people they work with all to maintain their income and status. They then look down on the vagrant smiling on the side of the road as if it’s impossible for that individual to of obtained happiness without scrambling up the capitalist ladder.

More and more, as I travel, I see a commonality becoming increasingly apparent amongst humans everywhere. The less bloated peoples lives are with wealth and objects the more happy they are, as long as they can comfortably provide themselves with the bare essentials of clothes, food and shelter then everything else is excess. I’ve been on this roller-coaster of getting better jobs, working on my career and experience, all for this false peak of happiness that seems to always be on the horizon. I finally stopped and looked at my life in the third person. Why do people in the West spend so much of their lives in these pollution choked cities, working tedious jobs with little personal satisfaction for a wage that goes into paying the mortgage on a house in a street where they don’t even know the names of their neighbours. Yet when they choose to go on a holiday, for the majority, we all do the same thing. We want to simplify our existence. We go somewhere where we can connect with nature daily, whether it be beaches and water, or forests and mountains. We all think that if we can just make enough money then we can retire from work and do what we actually would enjoy waking up to do everyday. Why can’t we do it now, today?

The truth is, there is very little right now, even in this supposed “world recession” stopping us from uprooting our lives and completely changing how we live. After a recent trip in Thailand I’ve started to see just how bittersweet my situation in life actual is. On one hand, I’ve been fortunate enough to of been born and raised in a developed Western country which allows me the options to travel wherever I want in the world. The options for what I do with my life are huge. On the other, the people I seen in Thailand, who will probably never be able to earn enough to leave their country where happy with their simple existence. I have been afforded options for my existence, but the adverse affect of this is that you are born into the fog of capitalism. Some people will never be able to see their way out of it, and constantly spend their lives scrambling towards that false peak of happiness. I hope, at least in the near future, I will be able to get off this hamster wheel. The first step towards this for me will hopefully be to travel more, without strings. I spend years living and working and feel, as a person, I barely grow at all. But travelling outside my comfort zone for merely a few days or weeks and I feel I’ve grown a mile.

Anyway, if all these reads as jargon, pay it no heed. I’m sure my opinions and thoughts on all of the above will be almost completely different a few years from now.

“When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence

It is one of the few food combinations that never gets old to my palette. We tried baked potatoes and omelettes but after a few days the thought of it just didn’t whet my appetite any more. Along with this sandwich; black cherries, tomatoes and marshmallows are also all foods that I could live with just eating for the rest of my life.

Maybe why I love ham, cheese and onion sambos so much has something to do with the combination having the perfect balance of Umami flavours. Umami, popularized due to MSG’s use in fast food restaurants as a flavour enhancer, is generally accepted as being one of our basic tastes. You know when you have some meat, like beef or lamb or cheese or broth and it has a flavour that you can’t quite put your finger on, well Umami is it, and we love it (which is why fast food outlets use it due to its addicting nature) although the Doctors tell us we shouldn’t.

Also, something which I don’t understand over here in Europe which they already have in the US is dipping sauce for sandwichs. Why don’t we have it? I’ve started using baked beans in tomato sauce and it makes the sandwiches taste 100 times better.

Further, if you want the daddy of all toasted cheese sambos, head to france and order a “Croque-monsieur”. Trust the gastronomic french to make the Ham & Cheese sandwich even better, and for you vege’s out there, I find a simple cheese & onion sandwich, without the ham, can sometimes be just as good.

At a recent expo, unrelated to engineering, I needed to use the facilities and found they had removed the old hot air hand driers and drag down towel dispensers with a Dyson Airblade. The name sounds pretentious and overly markety (Bill Hicks would have a field day), but it’s function more than makes up for this.

You simply place your hands in the unit and 2 opposing and angled down waves of cold air blow the water off your hands. I mean we’ve got so used to the only options being to dry off the water with paper towel of have the water dried off with heat that I’d never thought of the idea of room temperature air being used, not to dry the water, but to blow the water off your hands.

The Airblade works perfectly. You place your hands in it, the air starts, you pull them out and your hands are dry. Initially I thought my hands hadn’t been dried but upon inspection they where. I guess this is because human touch is pretty simple, it basically only detects pressure and temperature. There are large temperature and pressure changes with the old methods of drying your hands, but this one uses room temperature air to blow the water off your skin, so your skin experiences very low fluctuations of pressure and temperature.

I know its something simple and easily overlooked, but to me that is what makes the perfect invention. Something that effortlessly makes your life simpler, without causing any disruption to it. Also, it exists in a function where, upon using it, you wonder how you ever lived without it. On a plus, it’s also a lot more hygienic and energy efficient than the old hot air driers

Unfortunately, aside from that expo, I haven’t seen them installed anywhere else.

PS: I don’t work for Dyson AT ALL, I just like good design

Note: the picture at the beginning of this post is one I took of the actual, still working, hand dryer in the toilets at the base of the “Rock of Cashel”

Homepage: http://www.dysonairblade.ie/

If you want to check out his comic strips here is the complete collection:

Calvin & Hobbes complete online collection

Here are just a few of my favourites:

There was something very satisfying about that slice of bread and butter though. It’s hard to describe why, but it seems like a perfect balance of flavours and textures. It also brought up memories from being a kid and getting 3 slices of bread and butter with my soup for lunch during my summers off school. Whether the bread is toasted or soft it still has a very moreish taste to it. While in Paris recently, our breakfast at our hotel consisted of only fresh mini baguettes, butter and black coffee. But you know what, I didn’t mind at all. There is just something very satisfying about ripping apart fresh bread rolls and just roughly spreading some butter on them. The smells of warm bread mixed with the taste of the lightly salted butter is just perfect. But, like the old adage goes “man can not live on bread alone”, but still, as a quick snack I don’t think there is anything easier or better.

I also seen this Lurpak ad recently and it really does make my mouth water every time I see it. They really know how to cash in on the draw of fresh bread. See the video below.

Another aspect is the few moments after you wake up before your brain has fully gotten back up to speed. It happened to me last Saturday, I woke up, looked at the clock, and thought “CRAP!!! I’m late for work”… I heard a noise downstairs, wondered why my wife wasn’t at work and then the blissful realization hit me… “It’s Saturday”. Putting your head back onto the pillow (turning it over to the cool side of course), and having a long lie-in seldom feels as good when you thought you couldn’t.

I usually hate being forgettful, and the limits of my mind. Sometimes I can’t find a bookmark, and not wanting to dog ear my novel I just look at the page number and try to tell my brain to remember what page I finished on. Sure enough, the next day, I will have forgotten and will spend minutes flicking through the chapters trying to jog my memory. But for the examples above, and others that, ironically, I can’t remember, I’m glad that the human mind is sometimes a sieve, otherwise I wouldn’t find pleasure in discovering or realizing things I had all along.